Introducing The Unsmallable 60 Project

Turning 60, It's Time to Start Anew and Send It!

What nobody tells you is what happens when you go off the map.

You follow it perfectly. The career. The sale. The milestones. Then you look up, and the road is just… gone. People call this slowing down. They retire. They shrink. They don't know what to do next. They hand themselves a smaller life and call it wisdom.

I’ve seen their faces. It is not peace. It’s grief mixed with confusion.

I decided a long time ago I would not pay that price. This is my answer.

I’m writing this from Quito, Ecuador. I turn 60 in four days. There will be no party trip to Cabo. I’ll be at 12,000 feet on the flanks of Chimborazo — the farthest point from the center of the Earth — acclimatizing. Getting ready. On May 27th, I will attempt the summit.

This is not a midlife crisis. It’s a practice.

The practice is called misogi. (Thanks, Jesse Eitzler, for the inspiration to have a misogi!) One deliberately chosen hard thing with a real chance of failure. Not a stretch goal. A strategic intervention for your nervous system. Something that could break you, that you execute anyway.

This climb is the start of The Unsmallable 60 Project. Before I turn 61, I will climb 60,000 feet of vertical gain on summits new to me. If I’ve stood on top before, it doesn’t count.

The anchors are set. Chimborazo in Ecuador. Aconcagua in Argentina. Mera and Island Peaks in Nepal. Woven between them: Cotopaxi, the Haute Route, the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim, Orizaba.

I call it Susan's Summits — a riff on the Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent. I looked at that list and decided I didn't need to lose fingers, a nose, or my life to prove the point. Four 6,000-meter peaks. Non-technical. Hard enough.

This is the journal, not the highlight reel. You will get the altitude headaches. The midnight summit starts. The honest accounting when the heading is wrong, and I have to turn back. The view from the top when I do.

I’m a growth advisor and writer. A former founder who has learned that the real work happens just outside the comfort zone — well above the hard deck.

This isn’t a mission for permission. It’s a model for what’s possible when you refuse to be made small.

If you’ve ever stood at the edge of something and not gone — this is your front row seat. Watch what happens when someone does.

My misogi is your permission slip.

Come with me. Subscribe below — I want you here for all of it.

Whatever your edge looks like — the trip you haven’t booked, the conversation you haven’t had, the life you keep meaning to start — you’re not done.

Neither am I.

— Susan